American headlights have turned into a genuine road safety problem, and the technology to fix it has been sitting in European driveways for years.
Night driving in the US has grown measurably worse as LED and high-intensity lighting has grown more powerful. Adaptive driving beams are systems that automatically dim portions of the high beam to avoid blinding oncoming traffic, and they have been legal in Europe since the early 2010s. American regulators did not approve them until 2022, leaving US roads stuck with older fixed-beam designs even as the lights themselves got brighter. SUVs and trucks compound the problem, mounting headlights high enough to shine directly into the mirrors and eyes of drivers in lower vehicles.
Glare degrades night vision and slows reaction times. These are measurable effects that persisted not because the engineering was unsolved but because US safety standards had not kept pace. That is a road safety failure that was regulatory in nature, not technical.
Cars with adaptive beams are only now reaching American showrooms, four years after the rules changed and over a decade after Europe got there first.